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There’s plenty to like in Respawn’s battle royale game.
There is no Titanfall 3.

Respawn Entertainment producer Drew McCoy broke the news in a Eurogamer interview yesterday, extinguishing any hope that the futuristic mech-shooter could return to PCs and modern consoles. Instead, the EA-owned developer is offering a free-to-play game called Apex Legends. Is it worth your time? Yes, though for reasons you might not expect.

First, the basics. Apex is a 60-player deathmatch comprised of three-person teams. Before the game, you're required to choose one of eight heroes that have unique abilities. You can't have any doubles on your team -- so mastering multiple characters is a must -- but you will inevitably find clones of each hero out on the desert and jungle-themed battlefield.

Like Fortnite, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) and every other battle royale game, you can choose where to start on the map. One of your teammates is assigned 'Jumpmaster', but the other two can make suggestions by tapping R1, RB, or an equivalent keyboard command on PC.

Respawn calls this quick-chat system 'Smart Comms' and is, to put it mildly, freaking brilliant.

Want your team to go somewhere? Hit the button and everyone will see a waypoint both in the world and on their mini-map. Your hero will also say something explanatory, like "we should go here," so everybody else knows which of their partners made the recommendation. You can use the same button prompt to highlight equipment caches and specific items, including weapons, armour, ammunition and health packs, scattered throughout the world. The system makes it simple to keep a squad together and ensure that everyone is able to find the loot they want and need to survive.

Double-tapping the button, meanwhile, will tell your friends when and roughly where you've spotted an enemy. You can, of course, talk the old-fashioned way with a headset. But for those who like to stay mute -- which is a lot of people -- this is a godsend, and ensures that everyone can communicate quickly and effectively throughout each match.

Apex Legends

Apex Legends is set in the Titanfall universe, so many of the weapons and gear will be familiar to franchise fans. Some, but not all of the basic Titanfall abilities have carried over too. The quippy robot 'Pathfinder', for instance, can use a grapple to quickly scale cliffs and buildings. The mysterious 'Wraith', meanwhile, can enter the reality-breaking void to avoid damage and create safe tunnels with two connected portals.

The abilities can be combined in some truly fascinating ways. In one match, for instance, I grappled to the top of a rickety tower and quickly dispatched some unsuspecting foes. I held that position with my teammate, a Wraith, until the ring of death started to close in behind us. Instead of taking the stairs, which led straight to an enemy ambush, my partner set up a portal to a safe spot nearby. We were able to keep our spot until the last possible second and then flank our opponents below.

The character-specific powers are similar to Overwatch. Blizzard's co-operative shooter, however, has markedly stronger hero designs. Apex isn't an ugly game but the "legends" sit in a tonal no man's land between the zany antics of Overwatch and gritty, mud-covered soldiers of Call of Duty.

Some Titanfall abilities are absent, too. You can't wall-run, double-jump or summon a robot with an absurdly large sword. (I miss you, Ronin.)

Apex Legends

Still, I'm impressed with Respawn's imagination. The game has a two-stage death system, for instance, that rewards players who work together. If your health drops to zero, the rest of your squad still has some time to run over and revive you. Wait too long and you'll turn into a crate with a customizable banner on top. A second timer will then start -- and if this one runs dry, you're out of the game for good. If your teammates are fast, however, they can grab this emblem and revive you at a respawn point.

You're stronger, of course, as a three-man team. The respawn points are an obvious place for opposing squads to hide and launch skirmishes, however. The closest one could also be outside the ring, or inside a zone that will soon be consumed. Revivals are tricky, therefore, and have the potential to wipe out your entire squad. Do you gamble and go for it anyway? With two people, you can easily set up a lookout near the respawn point. Or do you abandon your friend and try to finish the game as a duo?

These choices are littered throughout every match. Do you start in a quiet corner of the map, or make for a hovering dropship that's brimming with loot and, no doubt, enemy squads? Should you focus on shotguns or sniper rifles? Which type of grenade will give you the most strategic advantage?

Apex Legends

I'm upset, of course, that Titanfall 3 isn't happening.

Apex Legends is a polished game, however, with varied heroes and a few subtle nods to Titanfall lore. Respawn is also promising plenty of updates, broken down into Fortnite-style seasons, that will add new heroes, weapons and cosmetic items. You can pick up a Battle Pass from March, which gives you more loot to unlock, or play the game free of charge.

Compared to Blackout, the battle royale in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, and the soon to be released Firestorm mode in Battlefield V -- each of which require the base game to play -- Apex Legends is an enticing free-to-play package. The shooter will have a hard time, however, competing with the cultural phenomenon that is Fortnite and the wealth of free-to-play rivals including PUBG and H1Z1. But if the game is successful, who knows, maybe Respawn can find a way to include its much-loved robots.

Apex Legends is available now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC.

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Two drones were apparently seen flying over Teterboro Airport to the north.

Just a month after reports of drone activity repeatedly closed Gatwick airport in the UK, Newark Liberty International Airport temporarily halted arrivals on Tuesday. In a tweet after it reopened, Newark said there were reports of drone activity "to the north" earlier. Reuters reports on an FAA statement saying that two drones were sighted at about 3,500 feet above Teterboro Airport, which along with Newark is operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

In the UK, EasyJet said that the Gatwick closings grounded 1,000 flights, caused 400 flight cancellations and cost it 15 million pounds in passenger compensation, calling the incident a "wake up call" for the industry. Gatwick and Heathrow purchased anti-drone systems after incidents, although police still have not identified anyone behind them after arresting and releasing two people.

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A copypasta claims Instagram only shows your posts to 7 percent of your followers.

Over the past few months, you might have seen Instagram posts claiming that the platform has only been showing your photos to seven percent of your followers. Turns out it's just some weird copypasta, which became big enough for the company to address. In an official statement posted on Twitter, Instagram has clarified that it hasn't made any changes to its algorithm recently and that it never hides users' posts. If you scroll down far enough, you will come across everyone's photos -- it's just that you might have a hard time seeing some friends' posts if you don't interact with them regularly and you're following tons of people.

The platform explained that the level of interaction determines the order of posts you see in your feed. It's clear from the comments in that Twitter thread, though, that people don't think that's any better. Users are asking Instagram to go back to displaying posts in chronological order like it did before it adopted Facebook's algorithmic feed. Instagram will likely continue to pattern its feed after its parent company's, though, so you may want to pay more attention to the posts of people you actually care about.
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It received approval for the first all-autonomous factory in the world.

Waymo just took another major step toward bringing self-driving cars into the mainstream. The Alphabet-owned brand has received approval to establish a factory for its driverless vehicles in Michigan. This will be the first factory in the world to be completely devoted to mass-producing Level 4 autonomous vehicles, the company said.

It may be a while before the first vehicles roll off the line. Waymo first plans to "identify a facility" somewhere in southeastern Michigan, and it's not clear when that factory might be ready. The company hopes to create "hundreds" of local jobs over the space of a few years.

The state is an obvious choice for manufacturing self-driving cars. On top of its close association with the car industry and the sheer number of qualified workers, it's a good testing environment. This gives Waymo a better opportunity to prove that its cars can handle snow and other less-than-forgiving weather conditions. Many self-driving projects in the US, including Waymo's own work in Arizona, tend to favor southern states where conditions are favorable year-round.

It's not certain just what mix of vehicles Waymo will produce. However, it suggests the planned factory is mainly meant for integrating autonomy into existing vehicles, as it does with Fiat Chrysler and Jaguar. You might not see it produce driverless cars made completely from scratch as a result. It's nonetheless a start, and it's no secret that many established brands see autonomous car production as the future.
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A fourth season is set to be released by Amazon later this year.

Amazon announced today that the third season of sci-fi series The Expanse will be available for Prime members to stream starting February 8th. The first two seasons of the show, which originally aired on Syfy, are already available to watch on Amazon's streaming platform. Amazon has a fourth season of the show planned that will be available later this year.

Season three of The Expanse is the last of the show's run on Syfy. The show based series of novels by James S. A. Corey was cancelled in May of last year. Word of the cancellation caused an uproar among the show's loyal viewership, which sparked the #SaveTheExpanse campaign on social media. Amazon quickly answered the call, and CEO Jeff Bezos announced the company would pick up The Expanse and continue producing it as a Prime Original series.

While Amazon is planning to drop season four of the show before the year ends, the company hasn't announced an official release date for the next installment in the series. The show should pick up right where it left off, though, seeing as the writer's room and cast from the Syfy version of The Expanse appears to be intact for the upcoming Amazon run.
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Its Jigsaw project wants to play a game.

For decades, phishing has proven an effective method for attackers to dupe just about anyone into clicking on malicious links so they can wreak havoc on personal and professional lives. Just ask John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign chief. Phishing scams can be tricky to spot, and Alphabet hopes to help you figure out whether links in your emails genuinely will lead to untold riches or help you lose weight with a magic pill (hint: probably not).

The company's Jigsaw unit wants to play a game, as it has created a quiz for you to test your phishing-detection skills in case spammy emails slip through your email service's filters and reach your inbox. The team drew from materials Jigsaw has used to train thousands of journalists, political figures and activists to craft the quiz. If you don't answer all the questions correctly, don't worry -- t he quiz will help you understand you what the latest phishing techniques look like, so you know what to watch out for in the real world.

If you do manage to figure out the correct answer to every question, well done, but you're not invulnerable. As Jigsaw suggests, it's probably worth enabling two-factor authentication whenever you can.
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You won't need to ask staff for a password.

It's not very fun to connect to WiFi at a café or hotel. If you don't have to ask staff for a password, they'll have to print it somewhere -- and it's still a hassle when all you want to do is check your email. Ten One Design thinks it might have a friction-free answer. It's releasing the Wifi Porter, an unassuming wood block that connects your handset to the local network with a tap. NFC-equipped Android phones and 2018 iPhones (the iPhone XS and XR) just have get near the block to get a connection prompt, with no app or password required. If your device doesn't have those luxuries, you can still connect using a QR code on the bottom.

The device is shipping as of mid-January, and it's not all that expensive at $40 for one block and $129 for a four-pack. It's probably overkill if you just want to save house guests the trouble of punching in a code, and it won't help much if you're connecting your laptop. Still, it might be just the ticket for eateries that would rather spend more time serving food than answering technical questions.
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And PUBG was the highest-earning premium game
In brief: We know that free-to-play games and battle royale titles generate a lot of cash, but is that amount decreasing? No, quite the opposite. A new report reveals that industry leader Fortnite earned $2.4 billion last year, “the most annual revenue of any game in history.” Fellow BR title PUBG did pretty well, too, amassing over $1 billion in digital revenue.

SuperData’s annual year in review notes that Fortnite’s influence helped push digital games revenue up 11 percent across mobile, PC, and console last year, reaching a total of $109.8 billion. The mobile platform led the way, bringing in $61.3 billion, followed by the PC’s contribution of $35.7 billion and console’s $12.7 billion.

Free-to-play console games also got a massive boost in 2018, with revenue jumping 458 percent to $88 billion. That figure represents 80 percent of all digital games revenue.

Sitting behind Fortnite on the highest earning FtP list is Dungeon Fighter Online ($1.5 billion), League of Legends ($1.4 billion), and Pokemon Go ($1.3 billion).

While it can’t match free-to-play, digital premium games’ revenue was also up last year, rising 10 percent to $17.8 billion. Despite living in the shadow of Fortnite, which Netflix just called a big competitor, PUBG was the top earner here, making 19 percent more than it did during 2017.

PUBG beat the likes of GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2 by generating $1.028 billion—a number that doesn’t include money from the mobile version, which would have pushed its total earnings even higher. Check out the full top ten list below.

1. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Bluehole - $1.028 billion

2. FIFA 18, Electronic Arts - $790 million

3. Grand Theft Auto V, Take-Two Interactive - $628 million

4. Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII, Activision Blizzard - $612 million

5. Red Dead Redemption 2, Take-Two Interactive - $516 million

6. Call of Duty: WWII, Activision Blizzard - $506 million

7. FIFA 19, Electronic Arts - $482 million

8. Monster Hunter: World, Capcom - $467 million

9. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, Ubisoft - $440 million

10. Overwatch, Activision Blizzard - $429 million
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Sniper Elite 4 is another game where the Radeon GPUs do very well. Here the RX 570 matched the 1% low performance of the 3GB 1060, while beating it for the average frame rate convincingly at 1080p.

The RX 580 also beat the 6GB 1060 by a comfortable margin and was even 18% faster than the 570 at 1080p.

Performance in Monster Hunter World is competitive between the RX 570, 580 and GTX 1060. The 3GB 1060 edges out the RX 570, while the RX 580 beats the 6GB 1060, but bang for your buck the RX 570 stacks up very well.

At 1080p we see that AMD GPUs enjoy slightly better frame time performance in Warframe, though the 1060’s did provide the best average frame rate performance. Frame time performance improves for the GeForce GPUs at 1440p and here the 3GB 1060 beats the RX 570 by a comfortable margin.

The Just Cause 4 performance was also close. Here the RX 570 and GTX 1060 3GB were neck and neck, while the RX 580 was 7% faster than the 6GB 1060 when looking at the average frame rate.

Grand Theft Auto V provided the RX 570 with its smallest win over the GTX 1050 Ti, so it’s no surprise to find the GTX 1060 pulling ahead here. The 3GB 1060 was able to beat the RX 580, though the frame time performance was nearly the same. Put in other words, GeForce cards are hands down the better choice for playing GTA V.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is another title that doesn’t work that well with AMD hardware, despite the fact that it’s an AMD sponsored title. The RX 580 gets trounced by the 6GB 1060, though the 3GB version of the card struggle with some pretty ugly frame time results at 1440p and 1080p.

The Hitman 2 results are quite competitive. Here the 3GB 1060 edged ahead of the RX 570 at 1080p, though it did fall behind at 1440p. The RX 580 was able to beat the 6GB 1060 at both resolutions.

Radeon GPUs have always done well in Rainbow Six Siege and here we see the RX 580 trashing the 6GB GTX 1060, though the 3GB model stacks up very well against the RX 570. Now, we should note that the ultra quality preset uses a default render scale of 50, not 50%, just 50, what this means is 1920x1080 becomes 1360x764. The game uses temporal upscaling, so you end up with an image that’s rescaled to the output resolution.

We used to test with these settings as this is the default mode, but many Rainbow Six Siege players complained that our frame rates were too high, not realizing that they had manually configured these options and that the maximum in-game preset actually sets the render scale almost 30% lower than the output resolution. So now we select the Ultra preset and also adjust the rendering scale to 100 every time.

This makes the game very VRAM hungry. At 1080p the game calls for at least 6.4 GB of memory, so the 3GB 1060 and 4GB RX 570 get hit pretty hard. It’s not often the 8GB RX 580 offers over 40% more performance than the 4GB RX 570 at 1080p, but that’s the situation using these settings. In the end, the RX 580 easily beats the 6GB 1060, while the 3GB 1060 and RX 570 are comparable across the two tested resolutions.

The last game we’re going to discuss the results for is World of Tanks and here all GPUs performed well at 1080p. Both GTX 1060 models easily beat the Radeon competition, particularly at 1080p. The 3GB 1060 for example was 22% faster than the RX 570. That margin was reduced at 1440p to 16% which is still a solid win for Nvidia.

Performance Summary

In our recent Radeon RX 570 test, we found this budget GPU to be 43% faster than the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti on average. That metric was the result of calculating the percentage difference per game and then averaging those figures by the number of games tested.

Since we're comparing not two but five GPUs this time, we will do our math a bit differently. Instead we’re simply taking the fps data from all the games and then averaging those figures. This sees the RX 570 come out on top by a 41% margin agains t the GTX 1050 Ti, so as you can appreciate, there's a difference but the outcome should be the same.

The 3GB GTX 1060 was on average 4% faster than the RX 570 across the 36 games tested, giving it a 3 fps advantage. Then we see a further 14% jump in performance to the RX 580 8GB and GTX 1060 6GB, both of which averaged 82 fps across the 36 game sample.

This made the 8GB RX 580 on average 19% faster than the 4GB RX 570 and this makes sense given the 580 packs 13% more cores with an 8% core clock speed advantage, and we saw a few instances where having twice the VRAM was also advantageous.

Before moving on, here is a quick breakdown of how the RX 570 compares to the other GPUs tested on a per game basis. In our previous article, we saw how it dominated the GTX 1050 Ti across all 36 games, and as I said earlier when calculating the percentage difference per game we end up with a 43% performance advantage in favor of the RX 570 due to the rounding error.

Against the GTX 1060 3GB, the RX 570 was 4% slower on average and on the chart below you can clearly see where the Radeon GPU got the better of the 3GB 1060, and where the GeForce GPU came out on top.

The RX 570 enjoyed big wins in Forza Horizon 4 and Hitman, while it lost by a convincing margin in Total War Saga, GTA V and Fortnite.

As you might expect the performance deficit is extended when compared to the 6GB GTX 1060...

In a mainstream Radeon vs. Radeon comparison, the RX 580 against the RX 570, the latter was on average 14% slower.

Right so that’s how they stack up across a wide range of games and those are certainly the margins you can typically expect to see. The only question left to answer now is, how do they stack up in terms of value, and to answer that let’s check out the cost per frame figures.
Finding the Best Value: Cost Per Frame

To put together the cost per frame chart, we used all US dollar amounts taken from Newegg listings. We ignored the absolute lowest price if there was a single model available at that price which we hope is the most accurate and fair representation of current prices.

At a current retail price of $150 the Radeon RX 570 costs just $2.17 per frame, but even if we used the $170 MSRP it still only comes to $2.46 making it 11% cheaper than the 3GB GTX 1060.

The RX 580 is also exceptional value at the current $190 asking price. It’s just 6% more expensive per frame than the RX 570 and an impressive 21% cheaper than the GeForce GTX 1060 6GB. At the bottom of the graph we see that the GTX 1050 Ti does not offer good value at the current asking price. At $170 it's almost 60% more expensive per frame than the RX 570, so for that GPU to make sense it should be selling closer to $140.

Taking those figures into account (and the fact that good FreeSync monitors should prove very popular with gamers all of a sudden) we find that if you’re looking to spend less than $200 on a graphics card, it’s hard to go past the $150 RX 570.

Nvidia has said that GTX 10 series cards will be running out of stock soon (matter of weeks), but for that to happen at the mainstream, some form of drop-in replacement GPUs will have to be introduced. For now, we'd avoid the 3GB GTX 1060 given that the limited VRAM buffer is already a problem and will become more of an issue with many upcoming titles, even at 1080p. Even 4GB is right on the edge, so if you can stretch the budget, we recommend snapping up an 8GB RX 580.
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LONDON: Facebook says it has removed hundreds of Russia-linked pages, groups, and accounts that it says were part of two big disinformation operations, in its latest effort to fight fake news.
The social media company said Thursday it took action after finding two networks “that engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior” on its Facebook and Instagram platforms.
Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said in a blog post that one network operated in countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the other focused on Ukraine.
The people running the accounts represented themselves as independent news sources and posted on topics like anti-NATO sentiment and protest movements.
Gleicher says one network of 364 pages and accounts were linked to employees of Sputnik, a Russian state-run English-language news site.
Sputnik did not reply to emailed requests for comment.
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American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company, by Bryce G. Hoffman, is a great business book about one of the best CEOs of all time, in my opinion. It also is the story of a business leader who, as I like to say, thinks like a designer.

"Running a business is a design job. You need a point of view about the future, a really good plan to deliver that future, and then relentless implementation," Mulally told the author.

If you have optimism, empathy, holistic thinking, collaboration, and an open mind--then you are thinking like a designer. You have a high design quotient (DQ), just as Alan Mulally does.

Here are five principles for how you can think like Mulally, a designer of business.
1. Think positively.

Mulally's optimism is famous. As Hoffman notes in American Icon, "Clearly Ford faced a long, uphill battle back to profitability--a daunting prospect for everybody but Mulally. Belying the predictions that the harsh realities of the American automobile industry would soon grind him down, he seemed to be having the time of his life." Even in the worst moments at Ford, and it's had more than its fair share, Mulally approached every problem with the belief that a better solution was possible. This is central to thinking like a designer.

How:

While it may be true Mulally was born an optimist, two strategic tools made him a positive thinker as a leader. One was his belief in the process, what he calls "emotional resilience" that comes from trusting the process will work. The other is his "find-a-way" attitude" that is about proposing a plan, rather than stating the problem.
2. Have empathy.

Empathy is putting yourself in other people's shoes to see things from their perspective. When you empathize, you are human-centered. Empathy is not something you can develop and nurture in the safety of your office. You need to get out, meet people, talk to them, and observe them--to take away the layers of hierarchy between you and your customers until you're literally face-to-face with them in their natural habitat.

How:

Mulally did this by working as a salesperson in a dealership. A. G. Lafley, the former CEO of P&G, did it by washing laundry with customers. Empathy building with customers also builds trust, as Hoffman's description of Mulally demonstrates: "A few minutes later, Mulally had made his first sale. In less than an hour, he made two more. Another was pending. It would not be the last time Mulally played at being a car salesman. This was a way for him to see firsthand how Ford's customers approached its cars and trucks. But it also generated a huge amount of goodwill for the company. Everybody who met Mulally walked away an ambassador for Ford. He had that effect on people."
3. Think holistically.

Thinking like a designer is about opening your viewing angle really, really wide to see the big picture. It's seeing things from different points of view so that you can connect the dots in new and valuable ways. Gather inspiration and information like a bee pollinating from many flowers.

How:

Mulally cast a wide net to see the big picture--he talked to industry experts, veteran journalists, and even to his competitors (like then GM CEO Rick Wagoner); he read reports, white papers, newspaper articles; he flew to Consumer Reports' automotive testing division; he talked to customers, dealers, investors, and employees; he looked at Ford's archives for inspiration, as Hoffman describes, "like a miner convinced that the goal was close at hand."
4. Collaborate.

If you want to improve people's lives, you need to collaborate. It is too big an undertaking to pull off alone. Working in silos, in the isolation of the different departments, can lead to serious mistakes that can be avoided through collaboration. The value of helping one another across disciplines, departments, regions is indispensable. Collaboration means design, engineering, manufacturing, purchasing, sales--all disciplines literally having a seat at the table together.

How:

Mulally held a business plan review (BPR) every week, same time, place, and day, with mandatory attendance and where collaboration was not only encouraged but necessary. Holding a BPR, or a variation of it, is a must-have tool for any leader serious about collaboration. As Mulally told Hoffman, "Working together always works. It always works. Everybody has to be on the team. They have to be interdependent with each other."
5. Have an open mind.

Thinking like a designer is having an open enough mind to imagine the future using what you know today. It's asking "what if" questions to explore what can be versus what already exists.

How:

Despite his incredible success and experience at Boeing, Mulally brought a beginner's mind to Ford. He was unafraid to ask questions like a novice and learn like a student, captured by Hoffman, "Mulally knew he still had a lot to learn before he could finalize his plan, and he threw himself at that task like a senior before finals week."

After I wrote this post, I reached out to Mulally to ask what he'd like to add.

"The leader holds themselves and all the participants responsible and accountable for following our agreed-to process and expected behaviors, with zero tolerance for violating either," he told me.

Among his many exceptional leadership qualities, Mulally has an exceptionally high DQ, the ability to think like a designer. You can increase your DQ, too, by building these principles into your leadership skills and by practicing them, bringing everyone together.

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Business owners, get your wallets ready: Google's G Suite is getting its first-ever price hike.

On April 2, Google will raise the cost of licenses for the productivity suite, which includes apps such as Gmail, Docs, and Drive. G Suite Basic Edition will increase to $6 per user per month, up from $5, while G Suite Business Edition will increase to $12 per user per month, up from $10, the company announced Wednesday.

Among other differences from the Basic Edition, G Suite Business has no cap on storage and allows more people to use Google's video conferencing service at once. The price of the G Suite enterprise tier, which includes additional upgrades, will remain at $25 per user per month.

"Over the last ten years, G Suite has grown to provide more tools, functionality, and value to help businesses transform the way they work," Google wrote on its blog. "The one thing that hasn't changed over this time, is price."

Launched in 2006, G Suite is used by more than 4 million businesses. Customers with monthly plans will start paying the new price on April 2. Users on annual plans will begin paying the new price when their subscription renews, on or after April 2. Renewals prior to that date will not be affected by these changes, according to the company.

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One Echo is good, but several Echos are better. Amazon’s Echo devices have multiroom audio support, which allows users to simultaneously stream music over multiple speakers, making it feasible for people to outfit their entire homes with Amazon’s smart speaker.

The feature lets you play audio from Amazon Music, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Spotify, and Sirius XM over multiple speakers. It even added Apple Music support last December.

To set up multiroom audio, open the Alexa app and select Devices. Tap the + icon in the top right, and select Add Multi-Room Music Speakers. The app will then prompt you to create a group, making it easier to control music playback by saying things like “Alexa play music upstairs” instead of calling out individual speakers. Once you’ve created your group(s), add your desired devices and the setup is complete.

Using multiroom audio is as simple as everything else with the Echo — just say where you want the music to play. Saying “Play Justin Timberlake” followed by the name of your group will activate the music in your desired location, and so far it’s worked flawlessly in my testing.

Now, if you’re like me and you enjoy the ease of use that multiroom audio support provides, but you would like to utilize it with better speakers, like Sonos for example, you can do that as well. First, you have to use your Alexa app to add the Sonos Skill and to discover your Sonos devices. You should also add the music services that you are using with your Sonos system. (Any music services you want to use need to be on both the Alexa and Sonos apps.) You can then control your Sonos devices using Alexa and create groups of Sonos products within your Alexa app. (You can also associate Alexa with a single Sonos speaker and use your Sonos app to create a group associated with that speaker.)

Sonos may not be the only company rolling out an integration with Amazon. Amazon has released an API to allow third-party Alexa speakers to operate within the multiroom audio playback setup. At this rate, soon Alexa will be the main operator of all the music in your home, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Multiroom audio playback is available to Echo owners in the US, UK, and Germany on Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Show devices.

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AI and ML systems are turning the professional gambling world on its head.

The act of gambling on games of chance has been around for as long as the games themselves. For as long as there's been money to be made wagering on the uncertain outcomes of these events, bettors have been leveraging mathematics to give them an edge on the house. As gaming has moved from bookies and casinos into the digital realm, gamblers are beginning to use modern computing techniques, especially AI and machine learning, to increase their odds of winning.

But that betting blade cuts both ways, as researchers work to design artificial intelligences capable of beating professional players at their own game -- and even out-wagering sportsbooks.

The rate at which machine-learning AI systems have caught up and overtaken the skills of their human opponents has accelerated at a frightening pace in the past few years. IBM's Watson famously wiped the floor against Jeopardy's master class of players in 2011. AlphaGo, from Google's DeepMind division, beat European Go champion Fan Hui less than three years ago, in 2016, before mopping up South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol two months later and posting a 60-0 record in online matches against some of the best players on the planet a year later.

The year 2017 saw AlphaZero, an AlphaGo offshoot, demolish the world champion chess program, Stockfish 8, in a 100-game matchup after spending just four hours learning how to play. And while it took a bit longer to master Dota 2 -- "3500 simulated years" longer -- OpenAI's digital competitor managed to best the top amateur players in 2018.

AI has proved itself quite literally capable of beating humans at their own games, but does that hold true when the chips are down and real money is on the line? As the Libratus system from Carnegie Mellon University showed in 2017, the answer remains a resounding yes.

It wasn't as much a poker tournament as a three week curb-stomping. Professional poker players Jason Les, Dong Kyu Kim, Daniel McAulay and Jimmy Chou spent 20 days playing 120,000 hands of heads-up, no-limit Texas Hold'em against the AI but wound up losing by a margin of more than $1.76 million in the end.

"In the start here, we lost the first day," Les told Engadget in 2018. "Whatever -- not a big deal. And then we were losing, but then we fought back up to nearly equal. We were feeling really confident!" But confidence wasn't enough to halt the gambling juggernaut's advance. "It just kept improving every single day, and we started going backwards and backwards," he continued.

The loss stung for Les and Kim who, two years prior, beat the pants off another poker AI, Claudico. That said, their drubbing wasn't nearly as bad as what Lengpudashi, Libratus' second iteration, put World Series veteran Alan Du and a team of engineers through later that year. Even though the humans tried to apply machine-learning lessons gleaned from the original tournament, the result was another bloodbath. The AI won by a landslide after more than 36,000 hands were played.

"People think that bluffing is very human -- it turns out that's not true," Libratus co-developer Noam Brown said in a statement. "A computer can learn from experience that if it has a weak hand and it bluffs, it can make more money."

Robert De Niro's Casino character, Sam "Ace" Rothstein, was a living actuarial table for the Las Vegas mob. His encyclopedic knowledge of sports variables allowed him to make betting (and winning) look easy. Today, thanks to the rise of big data analytics and algorithmic AI, virtually any schmuck at the local sportsbook can perform at Rothstein's level.

In fact, sports betting -- whether it's guessing who will win outright or what the margin of victory will be -- is well suited for machine-learning applications. As Rory Bunker and Fadi Thabtah of Auckland University of Technology and the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology, respectively, illustrate in their 2017 study, "A machine learning framework for sport result prediction," estimating the outcome of sports is a fairly straightforward affair for machine-learning systems.

"One of the common machine learning (ML) tasks, which involves predicting a target variable in previously unseen data, is classification," the researchers write. "The aim of classification is to predict a target variable (class) by building a classification model based on a training dataset, and then utilizing that model to predict the value of the class of test data."

With these models, clubs and managers can better size up their opponents and formulate better strategies to win more matches, while sportsbooks and individual bettors can more accurately estimate the game's outcome ahead of time. "In sport prediction, large numbers of features can be collected including the historical performance of the teams, results of matches, and data on players," the researchers continue, "to help different stakeholders understand the odds of winning or losing forthcoming matches."

What's more, these systems are in no way left wanting for training data. Any number of Major League Baseball stats can easily be gleaned from MLB.com, Baseball Reference, Sean Lahman's database and Retrosheet, for example, just as advanced NHL stats can be found at Hockey Reference and NFL data is available from NFL.com, ESPN or Pro Football Reference. Even the ATP tour for tennis has begun collecting analytic data to improve the game for players and fans alike, having teamed with Infosys in 2015.

"In US sports, we're data junkies," ATP chair umpire Ali Nili explained to Forbes in 2018. "If you look at an NBA game, afterward you look at stats. If you're not a fan of the game they look like gibberish but a 6-year-old fan of the sport can translate it for you. The scope of data collection these days has no end. Tennis is no different, we're getting more data and using more and more information."

With so much data so freely available, it's no surprise that a number of enterprising outfits are already leveraging AI and ML to perform seemingly impossible feats of predictive sports analysis. UK-based Stratagem, for example, is training AI to extract actionable patterns from football, baseball and tennis matches and use that data to make better bets.

The company currently employs human analyzers to track matches, then combines the data with odds from a variety of bookies to improve its wagering, but it is also in the process of developing a deep neural network to perform the same task in real time simply by watching a broadcast feed of the match, according to The Verge.

"Football [soccer] is such a low-scoring game that you need to focus on these sorts of metrics to make predictions," Stratagem founder Andreas Koukorinis told The Verge in 2018. "If there's a shot on target from 30 yards with 11 people in front of the striker and that ends in a goal, yes, it looks spectacular on TV, but it's not exciting for us. Because if you repeat it 100 times the outcomes won't be the same. But if you have Lionel Messi running down the pitch and he's one-on-one with the goalie, the conversion rate on that is 80 percent. We look at what created that situation. We try to take the randomness out, and look at how good the teams are at what they're trying to do, which is generate goal-scoring opportunities."

Even more impressive are the predictions made by Unanimous AI. In 2016, the company released its "swarm intelligence" platform UNU, which "enables groups to get together as online swarms... combining their thoughts, opinions, and intuitions in real-time to answer questions, make predictions, reach decisions... as a unified collective intelligence," according to a press statement. Using UNU, Unanimous managed a superfecta at that year's Kentucky Derby. That means the company correctly predicted which four horses would cross the finish line first, in order, beating 540-to-1 odds.

"We were reluctant to take this challenge," David Baltaxe, Unanimous' chief information officer, said in a statement. "Nobody here knows anything about horse racing, and it's notorious for being unpredictable. Still, UNU surprises us again and again, so we recruited a swarm of volunteers through an online ad. The whole thing took 20 minutes."

NFL: FEB 05 Super Bowl LI - Falcons v Patriots

The following February, Unanimous' system correctly predicted the outcome of Super Bowl LI -- down to the precise 34-28 final score -- then went on to correctly pick 11 of that year's 18 Oscar winners.

Should the capabilities of AI and ML systems continue to improve -- and there's no evidence to suggest that they won't -- this technology could fundamentally upend the world of professional sports betting. However, there are still limitations to what these systems can accomplish. For example, current predictive systems don't have a means of accounting for a team's mojo, how well the players "click" with one another or shifts in a game's momentum.

"In some team sports, very good players don't do much that's measurable," Adam Kucharski, author of The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling, told Digital Trends last February. "A very good player might just get into a good position. Tackle rates won't show that. It's their positioning and intuitive behavior that is having an influence."

But with future advancements in supplementary fields like machine vision, these predictive engines will become even more potent. Say, for example, Jonathan Toews from the Blackhawks crumples on the ice after a vicious slash to the knee. Existing algorithms can't currently take his injury into account and update their odds, at least until the results from the team doctor are reported. But with machine vision, future systems may well be able to suss out the seriousness of his injury simply by gauging how badly he's grimacing.

Ultimately, this technology will reach a singularity wherein we'll be using AI-driven analytics to place real-time bets on robo-death matches. At least, with any luck we will.
https://www.geezgo.com/sps/52319

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